#TG Life
This week, the Cinephile film club will celebrate International Women’s Day with the screening of Across the Universe directed by Julie Taymor on Thursday March 7 at 6.30 pm and a retrospective of acclaimed filmmaker Sai Paranjpye from March 8-10, in the presence of the director. Sparsh (1980), Katha (1983), Disha (1990) and Saaz (1997) are the films which will be screened.
Julie Taymor’s breathtaking musical romantic drama features the Beatles songs as a backdrop. Based on an original screenplay co-written by Taymor, the film was nominated for the Academy Awards (Best costume design) and Golden Globe (Best motion picture. Set in the 1960s, the story is about the romance between a Liverpool artist and an American woman during the Vietnam war. Practically all the popular songs by the Beatles feature in the film, sung by the actors - Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood Timmy Mitchum and more.
On International Women’s Day March 8, a retrospective of Sai Paranjpye will be inaugurated in her presence with the screening of Sparsh, followed by a question and answer session.
Winner of the National award for Best Feature film (Hindi), it also won Sai Paranjpye Best Screenplay and Nasseruddin Shah won the Best Actor for his performance as a visually impaired head in a school for the blind.
Saaz is a tale of two sisters, played by Aruna Irani and Shabana Azmi who are both singers, with rivalry between them since childhood. Raghuvir Yadav plays their father while tabla maestri Zakir Hussain is seen in a cameo.
Based on the Marathi play Sasa ani Kasaav (The hare and the tortoise) by S.G.Sathye, the film has Rajaram (Naseeruddin Shah) as the tortoise with Bashu (Farooque Shaikh) as his competitor trying to woo Sandhya (Deepti Naval) with cameos by other well-known actors.
While migration continues to be a highly discussed subject, Paranjye dealt with it way back in 1990. The story revolves around two farmers from a village in Maharashtra who decide to migrate to Bombay as it was known then, in search of a better life. They realize it the hard way that life is not a bed of roses in the city also.
